Start Again
by Isabeau1
Summary: Certain tales need to be told and things set straight before friendships can begin. OR Sandy is the only one who actually knows how to listen, and Bunny needs to act like a grown up sometimes.
1. Ch 1: The Sandman hears a tale

Start Again

_**Chapter one:** In which the Sandman hears a tale_

Sandy had been understandably curious about what had transpired after Pitch had shot him. For him, time had been absent as he drifted in the memory of falling stars and nightmare gallons and clung to the single clear voice of the celestial child who had wished him well.

Bad things had happened to his friends while he was gone, dark things that left aches and scars that did not show, yet were visible just under the surface. None of them would tell him though. They looked away and muttered vagueness, and would not meet his eyes, as if there were some guilt involved.

Finally, out of sheer frustration, he went to Jack. The winter child was decisively skittish around all of them. He was drawn, almost unwillingly it seemed, to the possibility of company, but he was unable to settle into it, always gone as quickly as he came. He would not go near Bunnymund at all. Sandy had spotted him more than once crouched in windows at the Pole, peering in and leaving as soon as he spotted the Pooka, the frosted glass the only sign that he had been there.

They were a few weeks into spring now, and Sandy found Jack far north, where winter still held sway. He was perched on a roof in an Inuit fishing village, watching over children who still had snow to push each other into.

He smiled when Sandy landed next to him, shifting his staff from one side to the other to make room.

"What brings you up here while it's still day light?" the boy cocked his head to the side, curious.

Sandy smiled and reached over to tap Jack's left hand. He had broken the last two fingers on the hand in the battle with Pitch, but they were finally free of the ice he had encased them in.

"Yeah," Jack shrugged, holding out the hand and flexing his fingers lightly. "It's healed. Still a little tender, but it will loosen up."

He spoke as someone with experience in these things, and it made Sandy sad. It wasn't the sort of experience he wanted anyone to gain. He squeezed Jack's hand lightly and smiled.

Jack returned the grin, then shifted suddenly, bringing up his staff. Sandy looked down in time to see a young boy slip on a sudden patch of ice and fall into a snow drift, out of the way of a speeding snow mobile. He watched Jack forming a snowball out of the corner of his eye, but before he could query, the boy had thrown it, hitting the back end of the machine with a force that dented the metal. The driver skidded to a stop, looking around for what had hit him.

"That's why I'm on the naughty list," Jack settled back, hooking an arm around one knee, "one of the reasons anyway."

Sandy made a mental note to talk to North about Jack's place on the list, but that wasn't why he had come. He touched Jack's shoulder to get his attention and formed a question mark over his head.

"Okay," Jack drew the word out almost cautiously, "what's your question?"

Sandy created an image of Pitch drawing an arrow and an image of himself waking up with a question mark in-between.

"You want to know what happened?" Jack frowned, fingering his staff nervously. "Shouldn't you ask the others?"

Sandy gave him an exasperated look, and the boy sighed, drawing his other knee up to him and settling his staff against the crook of his shoulder.

"I guess I can tell you," he rested his chin on his knees. "It would be better if they did though."

Sandy touched his shoulder again, the question mark reappearing and his expression encouraging. Jack nodded and rubbed at his eyes tiredly, making the Sandman wonder when the last time he slept had been.

"After…" Jack trailed off, his arms tightening around his knees, and Sandy squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. "After…"

Jack seemed unable to finish the sentence, even with Sandy sitting shoulder to shoulder with him, and Sandy was suddenly more concerned with Jack than with the story. This might not be a story the boy was ready to tell, but before Sandy could convey as much Jack continued.

"We went back to the Pole," Jack jumped ahead slightly. "They thought Easter would be able to fix things, to stop Pitch from being able to take all the belief from the kids. I don't know, maybe it could have."

Sandy already knew that Easter, in a sense, had not happened. Jack curled tighter into himself as he told the story, and Sandy touched his back lightly, waited for the shutter the touch caused to still before he began rubbing gentle circles. They had sent Jack into battle ill prepared. He had asked who Pitch was, and they had never given him an adequate answer, leaving him to stumble by himself through shadow and fear and confusion.

Jack left holes in the story, glossed over things that would at some point need to be farther explained, but not now. He was not gentle with himself in the telling, and Sandy suspected he was overly generous with the other Guardians. He had known them for centuries after all, and 'they were angry and I left' could not have even come close to an accurate description of what had happened after Easter.

He was more than a little appalled that Jack had been faced with Pitch alone not once, but three times. It seemed a miracle that any of them had survived the battled, or perhaps only a testament to what MiM had seen in Jack and the rest of them had missed.

"You know the rest," Jack trailed off, his face hidden against his knees.

Sandy threaded his arms around Jack's shoulders and pressed a kiss to his hair.

_Jackson_, he brushed gently against the boy's mind, and Jack started in his arms, looking up sharply.

Mind speak, as Nightlight called it, came naturally to most star children, though Sandy didn't use it often. The other Guardians were used to it, but it sometimes frightened the children of Earth. Jack only seemed surprised though.

_You did well,_ he stroked back the tousled hair, wondering if anyone had bothered to tell the boy that yet. _Everything would have been lost without you._

"I made a mess of everything," Jack shook his head, looking away. "It was my fault Easter was ruined, and you…"

_No,_ Sandy forced Jack's gaze back to him, _Pitch ruined Easter, Pitch hurt me, and while following a snake into its den may not be the smartest thing you've ever done, that doesn't make you responsible for Pitch's actions._

Jack dropped his gaze again, rubbing his eyes, and Sandy wrapped his arms around him, holding him until the tension drained from his body and he leaned his head on Sandy's shoulder, hands coming up tentatively to grip at the arms around him.

"Thanks Sandy," he murmured, voice barely audible.

_You are a wonder Jackson,_ Sandy held him close, _I'm sorry we missed it for so long._

* * *

A/N: There's a few hints at Sandy's back story from Sanderson Mansnoozie at the very beginning of this chapter. If you really want his back story from the books, PM me and I'll send it to you.

There isn't really a lot of continuity between the book series and the movie, but I'm still drawing my backgrounds for the characters from the books because I think it's a richer background to draw from, which is why Sandy 'talks.' (I know there are problems with randomly squishing the two together, but I'm trying not to over think it at this point.)

Having him speak in thought is my compromise between the books and the movie. Sandy talks in the book, so what I've done is model Sandy's silence off of Nightlight's silence, which is voluntary (Nightlight is a character from the book series who doesn't appear in the movie). Nightlight is perfectly capable of talking, but he's much more inclined to speak with thoughts than out loud. So, I have Sandy doing the same.

I'm calling the Man in the Moon 'MiM' because that's what he's called in the books, and I like it better than 'Manny'. His real name is Tsar Lunar.

Jack's broken fingers are totally head canon. He got thrown into a crevasse and knocked out of the sky. There must have been some injuries in there somewhere.

Next chapter: Bunnymund goes a hunting


	2. Ch 2: Bunnymund visits the Wilderness

Start Again

_**Chapter two:** In which Bunnymund visits the wilderness_

Bunnymund opened his tunnel and gave the air a cautious sniff before hopping out of his hole. Alaska was not a place he frequented, but that didn't mean he was unaware of the many large predators that called it home. Not that large predators worried him over much. Pookas were not rabbits no matter how many times North called him 'Rabbit-man,' and they did not make good prey.

Sandy had given him the name of the village he had last seen Jack in, but the boy was always difficult to find. It was only recently that Bunnymund had really had a reason to try. He would eventually perfect the art, but for now it had to be done the slow way, starting with where Jack had last been spotted.

The village was a small clap board affair, with not enough places for him to duck behind as he crept through it. It might not have even mattered. It was likely no one here could see him. He almost stepped out from behind the frame of an upturned boat as two children ran by, just to see, but in the end he stayed put. He would have to wait a year to gain back what he had lost.

The snow was patchy on the ground, but not fresh. If Jack was here, he wasn't doing much to fight spring. He sniffed at the air again, trying to pick up the winter child's scent. Instead, he felt the faint tingle that marked Jack's peculiar kind of magic. He followed it to a sled dog yard, finding it full of grumpy canines, lamenting the end of the running season.

They sent up a chorus of barks when they spotted him, and he hushed them irritably. Sled dogs were usually a friendly, over eager lot, nowhere near as high strung as grey hounds. In hind sight, he knew he had all but asked for that alarm to be set off. It had been a somewhat childish way for Jack to vent his frustration, but that didn't mean he hadn't deserved it.

By the time the whole fiasco with Pitch was done, he had deserved far worst. He just hadn't known it until Sandy had told him.

The sled dogs yipped and barked and jumped excitedly, telling him Jack had slept curled up among them only the night before, but they didn't know where he had gone or if he would be back.

He took some time to scratch ears and rub furry bellies before moving on. He could smell the frost on the wind and the faint breath of magic that accompanied it. Jack was moving north.

Bunnymund followed the trail away from the town and over steep hills, moving farther in land. It felt good to stretch his legs and run. He didn't do it often enough. He slowed at the sound of laughter, and dropped to all fours when the musky scent of bear hit his nose.

Jack was sitting on the edge of a rocky stream laughing, a pair of young bear cubs using him as a climbing tree. The mother bear was in the stream fishing. She flung a fish up on the bank for the cubs and Jack used his staff to nudge it away from the water before it could flop back into the river. The two cubs set to playing with it, apparently not quite sure how to eat it.

Jack looked happy, and Bunnymund almost didn't want to interrupt. Necessary though it was, this wasn't going to be a fun conversation for either of them. It was very possible Jack wouldn't want to talk to him at all. He certainly wouldn't have wanted to talk to him if he were Jack. It needed to happen though. Even if in the end Jack didn't forgive him and didn't want to be around him, he needed to at least try.

"Jack," Bunnymund didn't call his name loudly, but the boy still jumped, managing to go from the ground to the top of his staff in an instant.

The mother bear reared up and growled, the cubs scurrying into the water towards her.

"It's just me," Bunnymund help up his hands, palms open. "Sorry, didn't mean to startle you."

Jack looked at him warily from his perch atop his staff, then glanced over at the agitated mother bear. With a soft sigh he shooed her away, looking as if he would have liked to have gone with her as she lead her cubs farther down the river.

"What do you need?" the boy turned back to him cautiously, showing no sign of coming down.

"Just wanted to talk with you," Bunnymund sat himself on a boulder, hoping it would make him seem less threatening.

That just his presence was making the boy so nervous was a bad sign. He silently thanked the stars that Sandy had overheard him arguing with North about Jack and set them both straight. Now, hopefully, he could set things straight with Jack before they got any worse. The last thing he wanted was to have the boy scared of him.

"Okay," Jack didn't relax at all, looking apt to flee at any moment.

"I'm sorry about what I did at Easter," Bunnymund looked up at him, not wasting time on preamble.

"Huh?" Jack nearly fell off his staff he was so startled, which under different circumstances would have been funny.

"I never even gave you the chance to explain," Bunnymund continued. "It wasn't fair and it wasn't nice, and I'm sorry."

Jack resettled himself with his knee caught in the crook of his staff and looked at the Pooka suspiciously, as if he were trying to figure out what sort of trick he was playing.

"Wasn't very nice to you right from the start really," Bunnymund sighed.

And he meant from the very start. He had met Jack on a snowy Easter centuries ago. Chances were, the boy hadn't had anything to do with the snow that year, but he had obviously been enjoying it and Bunnymund had snapped at him.

Frost was creeping down the staff from under Jack's hands, and the ground under it was icing over. He looked at Bunnymund, then down at the ground, his grip tightening.

"I didn't do it, you know," the boy refused to look at him, his posture ridged, his voice edged with anger, "I didn't make a deal with Pitch for my memories."

"I know," Bunnymund nodded. "Sandy told me. I would have known anyway if I had taken half a second to think. If all you had wanted was your memories, you would have never come back to us after you had them."

Jack swallowed and relaxed his grip, the frost on his staff receding slightly.

"Baby Tooth tried to warn me," Jack said slowly, hesitantly, as if he thought Bunnymund might take back his apology, "but I thought I would have time, and there was a voice calling my name, and it sounded so familiar, and no one ever calls my name."

"It was Pitch," Bunnymund guessed; Sandy had been a little vague on the details of what had actually happened, but then Jack may have been vague in telling it.

"I think so," Jack nodded. "It was my sister's voice, but I think it was Pitch."

Bunnymund winced, "we never should have let you go alone. We should have known that after you knocked him on his backside he would come after you."

"I really am sorry about Easter," Jack slid down to the ground and held his staff behind his back, looking at his feet, "you and Sophie had so much fun getting ready for it, and then it all got ruined."

"It was fun," Bunnymund grinned and chuckled softly, "it was more fun than I've had in a long time."

"I should have come straight back like I said I would," Jack's shoulders slumped.

"I don't know Jackie," Bunnymund heaved a sigh, "there were a lot of nightmares. Having you there would probably have helped, but I don't know how much difference it would have make in the end. He waited until the eggs were dived down the different tunnels before he attacked. We had to split up to try to fight them."

"He wasn't even there," Jack grumbled.

"No, he was off trying to take a piece out of you," Bunnymund shook his head and pushed himself to his feet, relieved when Jack didn't tense or back away. "You think we can be done with this, that we could try again at being friends?" he held his hand out to Jack.

Jack hesitated, and all Bunnymund could do was wait. Jack didn't have to give him a second chance; he didn't have to risk the possibility of being hurt by trying again.

"Yeah," Jack breathed, smiling tentatively, "I'd like that."

He took Bunnymund's hand, and Bunnymund shook it gently, unsure which hand he had had broken fingers on, then let go and rumpled his hair, making the boy laugh.

"There's actually an entrance to the Warren about a mile that way," Bunnymund pointed across the river. "I have some left over chocolate that needs eating."

"Last one there's a jack-o-lope!" Jack grinned widely and took off.

"Have you met the jack-o-lope?" the Pooka dropped to all fours and raced after the boy with a laugh.

Jack chortled in response, and Bunnymund was more than happy to chase after him, closing the distance between them in leaps and bounds.

* * *

A/N: Thank you to everyone who reviewed and favorited! You made me very happy. :)

As you can see, Bunny does not have an Australian accent because I can't write accents and poorly written accents are hard to read.

Not too many book references this time, although I'm sort of leaning more towards Bunnymund's character in the book. Bunny from the movie and Bunny from the book are very different characters. I sort of ended up with a hybrid of the two here, and I hope it worked.

This little story was my response to the lack of resolution about what happened at Easter in the movie. Bunnymund, and to a lesser extent Toothiana and North, accused Jack of selling them out to Pitch, but he didn't do it. He did make a poor decision in not returning right away, but there is a world of difference between making a deal with the enemy and making a mistake, and they never addressed that in the movie. I really felt like Jack's relationship with the Guardians couldn't go anywhere until that had been cleared up, because even if they like Jack, they think he betrayed them and they can't trust him, and Jack has no reason to trust them because they wouldn't even give him the benefit of the doubt.

For anyone who has read _Cup of Kindness_, this is meant to be continuity with that story, although they are both stand alones.


End file.
